Krysia Jopek

Where were we then?

At the kiosk buying new night dreams.

At the shallow river skipping white stones too thin/

In cathedral-forest sunlight ribboning people we couldn’t be anymore.

Troubled but feigning the bravery of bird song gathering thistle before the black bears escapes winter.

But you were a painting by then—

Daffodils shifting across coalescing canvases—

A fractured melody of yellow kites and blue-star crocuses.

A spiritual notification maybe—

a dream sheathed in light.

The body always leaves itself.

The skeleton can’t always hold, you’d say.

That was after our mothers watched us from golden corridors–

Their redolence of lilac and jasmine–

their vanity tables they no longer owned.

The stars took over our city of coffee shops and too many stoplights,

turning them blue to move us vertical,

trade places in the magic of kindness—

magnified with moonglow on the sea forever blanketing ancient cities of pharaohs and kings–

women who bathe their feet with hibiscus and prayer for an altar of rain–

a new laziness with time.

When were we then?

In someone else’s dream bartering new memories,

emotional trampolines with bird-view of summer,

sky-view of clover—something momentarily divine.

The woman who has forgotten words wins at cards.

We’re playing horseshoes by the hyacinths.

Sleeping through mornings became a bad habit.

I’ll build you a poem after lunch or a mountain of sand.

With new medication, I can speak to anyone about trees.

Crabapple blossoms preen the picture window.

We were drinking the pink champagne of flowering pale willows–weeping rain.

Despite elegant wisteria climbing up the house across the chimney–

I was not hysterical.

Blueberry lilacs opened on Saturday, and my father disappears.

Some say the spikes of blue flowers in the lawn are weeds.

The lawnmower is broken this year anyway.

The cartoon deer on the cell phone drinks the stream.

The day, punctuated with gunfire from the shooting range.

There should be a spiritual carwash.

I wear you like sound.

The sparrow, a brown leaf traversing wind.

I paint the canvas yellow, titling it “Forsythia” for now.

His painting rhymed tourmaline with peridot.

How odd we have become after this.

The mute audience shaken by Absurd theatre.

Surds and bedouins.

I’m on a diet of oatmeal and promises.

The coyotes narrow our path.

A Robin’s egg, cracked on the driveway.

Three mourning doves gather grief, shattering.

Monarch butterflies, not more than an inch, fluttering.

We were eating onions to relearn layers.

Sunday tossed egg yolks the color of sun.

The sun knew itself because it had no choices.

Love wasn’t supposed to demolish.

Without shadows, we’re lovely.

There were seven types of memory, boredom, and darkness.

When night gave her stars, we counted them by sevens.

I assumed more stars would grow.

Dreams might dream a liquid plate of moonlight.

I gave someone a city, but he threaded it with golden walls.

Some harbor different strains of chaos.

I come and go, but the others only know the half of it.

The rain kept washing everything except the cities I gave away.

That place where you can’t speak or memorize childhood.

Time becomes a character moving in all directions.

Pain is shed, but no one knows where it goes.

If you fail to love anything, you can’t reappear.

Verbs become sluggish, clinging to nouns, even disappearing–

evening everything out.

Boat capsized; dog lost, boy shot, insurrection, contagion, incineration, smoke to sky.

I’m deleting memories that embarrass me without emotional shrapnel in my hair.

Night, a dark peony, drowns the clouds in its pages of God.

Rain and ice fall on the House enchanting eternity.

The inhabitants dream of chartreuse leaves unfurling from the tree-skeleton limbs at the windows–

emeralds far beneath the snow, love again.

Dust settles on material things they no longer need:

the untuned piano with coffee-stained keys,

a pile of warped vinyl records,

the paperback books with print too small to read.

The dog that barks only in sleep, sleeping–

chasing acrobatic squirrels or scared bunnies stuck still in the post-winter grass.

Garden beds await sun and fingers elongating the dream that wraps around yesterday’s confusion–

sleep’s down-feather blankets sheathing.

The ghosts of the house receding for respite from the unsettling conversations about entropy.

They accompany the owl in the backyard towering pines that sway in frigid spring winds.

Sentences might be constructed to lure them back across the empty brick patio.

We’re better now, we tell them.

The old woman will walk.

Blue primrose beckons yellow and red birdhouse stairs.

Meet me at the corner of trauma and belief, crocus and daffodil, underneath where I buried the dolls, their cracked faces, eyes open since winter.

Lily of the valley cupped bells and bleeding-heart lace shall decorate our sadness with iris and hyacinth-girl blossom beyond the bent poplars.

Our lost fathers have gone fishing for trout and shad, watching over our chipped, marble shoulders from absconded lily pads.

By the shed, I’ve left the talismans with my dread of the disease in the rusted suitcase of lost incantations.

Saturday’s late light falls through six feet of reverberations between us—awkward arias of abandon, etching away, while the neighbor’s children trampoline out of our skin.

Unsettling notes, crumpled pages, alight new tulips, earthworms carried by restless robins hopping away with our vaguest dreams of June.

Then we’ll picnic with the best version of ourselves; barter violets and emerald grass until the sickness falls away–hours cascading where inertia doesn’t hurt.

Meet me by the backyard garden under the sweet pea trellises, the ascending Equinox moon.

Tell the dream winding through prolifetating corrodors of broken windows not to end too soon.

Daffodil cups, intense yellow, trading sun.

The house, a main character, gives away its chimney, porch light, stairs.

The ceilings are filled with mourning doves, twitching pigeons.

At night the cello becomes human.

I had missed him, but the space he left grew wings.

Love is a music that bursts.

We are sorry for the delay of sentences meandering absurd fictions.

When you return, do so full-heartedly, so the falling city can gather wind.

Wing after wing tracing sky through fallout, brambles, and made-up magic.

Tell us something about the glass chariot sure to shatter sky when day crashes night.

How odd the poem keeps going without the conductor.

The trains have derailed in the boy’s basement room.

Out of nowhere, an army and makeshift barricade.

The bombing isn’t as loud on TV.

Dreams still appear truculent.

Don’t stare at the sun holding your worn-out suitcase of beliefs.

Things will go easier this way.

The brain is a city turned in on itself.

Parts of the grid have disappeared.

The neighbors can’t speak to one another about where they’ve been.

Children recognize their parents’ sorrows.

The mayor sleeps farthest from the sun.

Wind storms stole my vocation from me, my warrior name, my belief in a certain type of love.

I’m designing a patch under the sleeve to come back.

An elixir for figuring some of this out.

If I remember where you are, I’m sheathed in Sunday dream.

When the coffee wears off–the final winter days, truculent, shuffle sunlight.

The newly-fallen snow lights up the night.

We are beholden in the field of the poem.

When the planes lean down into their lights to land, we still ourselves in sink holes from long-ago buried tree trunks.

No one really remembers.

How the plow truck almost found us walking at the edge of the front yard.

How one sable, velvet glove waved to the confused old man from the frozen stream.

Or that there are plastic coffins amassed at the left corner of night in case the plane loses its passengers en route home.

But it’s very late now.

The stars are hidden behind a gauze of cloud-blanket not fog.

One street lamp blinks in and out, a misplaced lighthouse overlooking ice-encrusted tar.

A lazy eye wandering the neighborhood looking for coyotes.

When the missing glove is realized, one is already preoccupied with paying for this month’s electricity, this winter’s heating oil—while lining the pills up on the counter for tomorrow.

Everything hurt all at once, but the dream would come and rescue the old woman from her body.

The dream would set the table for a conversation with our ghosts.

Sleep comes and wants to take us.

Where? I ask, but sleep doesn’t answer.

Dreams pouring the boiled kettle over frozen birdbaths.

Winter drinking darkness and fire, domino-ing subtractions.

The holiday misplaced its presents, your blue notebook of revisions, my new gray sweater.

The cold causing some to sing before the deer found us.

When the house gave up its shadows, we followed sun.

Cathedral rooms of snow, pages of blackbirds, sentences that don’t end, my sea-logged, sea-bird feather pen.

The apparitions on the first floor steal wax paper envelopes of stamps.

The golden Madonna staring directly into the camera lens.

Last night the protagonist of the story misplaced the magical horizon, followed the river’s ice-flow.

Given the chest X-rays, everyone dreamed the sickness away.

On last year’s footage, the mob’s delusions play out tragically until the end of a different book.

Rrecycle, re-use, re-group, re-focus.

Sea lily.

The hurt animal under the holly.

Victorian porch labyrinth.

Wrought iron bird cages and window boxes.

Don’t shovel the deck.

Tell them you’re preparing for someone else’s future.

Twilight loses its wing.

The dog sleeps in.

The stitching of the series reveals our nomad names.

It’s not too late to play the shortest day against the new hour of ice-moon. Hello.

The new book climbed the house with prognostications we could’t claim.

The dream neurologists said I forgot I had forgotten you.

The spinal cord refusing.

Others would be looking, not for us, but for themselves

I can’t feel anymore, she said.

We’re frozen to the empty skating pond.

He said, the muse tangled your hair through tree branches gone thin.

Away from sun.

Take heart, he said–

It’s all temporary.

The House is quiet.

It can’t get any darker than 4:15 in December.

He said my eyes glowed green in the afternoon light before the sun gently fell.

The garage was cleaned enough to house the car.

There was enough wood left over from last year for at least one fire.

The surgery would end spinal pain eventually, if successful.

2 weeks of 37 staples down the back, a painful zipper.

Some would visit.

The dog and cat draw near.

Hospitals are sad places.

Nervous birds blend in with the curled oak’s tired hands before supper.

One foot of winter stepping in seems cruel already.

Maybe snow for Christmas.

How are you?